#This is their own undoing

[lovethatmakingcoffee]

at this rate the qsmp will explode by summer.

[despazito]

@staff i've been here since 2012 frankly i think i have every right to complain when you make terrible "improvements" to your core product.

[dendrochronologies]

it’s just me and this essay by hanif abdurraqib against the world

[shadowtraveled]

“will you do it? will you do it? i will help you.” this is it for me

[anuninterestingperson]

a comic about loop. i've put it under the cut for end-of-game secret spoilers!

closeups and some notes

the big panel on the first page is the one that i started out wanting to do as an illustration but i was like 'wait i want a bit of dialogue too' and so i was gonna do a one page comic but the timing of it didn't work out so it became two pages and since i wanted to do an illustration in the first place i ended up rendering the whole thing like one. don't particularly recommend.

i didn't eyedrop any of the colors, everything was just done with. like. black at varying levels of opacity (lol lol) so i was just eyeballing it, my hope is that i didn't whitewash anybody but if i did feel free to let me know and i'll edit it

the one in the back in the fireplace scene is nille of course. the n on her apron was sewn by bonnie who did their best

the scarf was knit by odile to give loop something to hide their face with and also 'coincidentally' so she could practice working craft into stitches

lulu and bumblebee as nicknames were stolen from future chapters of my fic and there is also secret shameless isiloop woven into this because it's me <3 only a little bit though haha

thank you as always to @insertdisc5 for these amazing characters and story! i've done more art in the past month and a half than i have in years it's wild

[quietwingsinthesky]

it’s that no one ever believed him that gets to me the most. this is a society of telepaths. and yet when the doctor finds out that the drums are real, he’s surprised. the master is surprised, elated, by the confirmation that he’s hearing something that’s really there, that this thing that’s been following him and hurting him for so long is real.

after a certain point, given that the master is Really Fucking Good at mind control and such, you have to imagine that no one could just pick up on the noise in his head with a little general telepathy. he had to choose to let the doctor in to share it. and. and okay. we need to put aside him striving to be The Best At Controlling People’s Minds in the context of him having his mind violated as a child because if i think about these two things in relation to each other i’ll throw up.

but there has to have been a point before he was so accomplished that he couldn’t have defended his own mind as easily. that he couldn’t keep someone, anyone, from delving into his head and hearing the drums. which means i must conclude, because we find out who put them in his head at all and it’s the most powerful guy on gallifrey, that when he was younger, the people around him did know. they could hear the drums. they could figure out what was done to him. but they did nothing, they said nothing, they told him he was hearing things. because if the lord president wanted to use a child for his own ends, who was going to stand up and stop him? easier to sweep it under the rug. and the master lived with that for so long that finally having just one other person hear the drums was a shock to him.

[flickerintwilights]

on the road to hell

[singingcicadas]

Your boss can be friends with you, but you can't be friends with your boss.

Perfect example of different expectations of different societal roles. Considering everyone a friend is the quality of a good leader, it demonstrates affinity and empathy to the people of which he leads, but at that level no one can ever consider him a friend back, at least not on an equal degree. There's no closeness, no real camaraderie. The position of Prime always takes precedence over any personal relationships. He is a Prime before he is his own person.

This is also the reason why I think Optimus can never go back to being Orion. Why an ending for Optimus as the retired common citizen is never an option. He's been exalted as a political/spiritual symbol for four million years, used to a position of power, it's not something he can simply renounce one day and expect people's perceptions to change. It's not even possible to change his own perceptions of himself, however much he might like to. You just can't erase four million years of ingrained mindset. He will be viewed as a threat to those in power and undermine their presence just by existing. People will flock to him regardless whether he wants it or not. On a personal level, he's never been the kind of peaceful obedient citizen who takes comfort in trying to live a normal life. Giving up being Prime means giving up control: he will never be content to pasture himself out and wait for other people to make decisions for him when the next crisis arises. He will never be content to have his words hold no weight when he speaks out against the next injustice.

Being Prime is not just a job, it's an identity. One that's defined by four million years of experience in a niche societal role with very specific expectations, of which he'd molded himself to fit. It's a lonely, crushing burden, associated with war and the old order and the question of whether one person should even have that kind of power - but for good or bad it's also a part of him. Taking that away would be truncation, not freedom.

[bonefall]

Is there a cat in cannon who got a good death who you think didn't deserve it? Especially if they committed crimes?

Tom the Wifebeater and his redemption death. No question. It's not even close.

Not only do I reject to the "redemption death" on the grounds of it being Tom the Wifebeater who is bullying others until his dying breath, even taunting Thunder about Turtle Tail is dead and the kits must be very torn up about it, but I reject "redemption through death" entirely. I don't like it in stories. It's a theme I deeply object to.

And again it's fucking wild that every time a character is a father, even if they are a wifebeater or a child abuser, the writers think that it bestows a glimmer of goodness into them which every abused child is forced to appreciate and cry about. Breezepelt, Thunder, Tallstar, Tom's children, all of them forced to reconcile and admit how much they wuv their papa.

Abusive dads in WC regularly get redemption deaths, too. Clear Sky dies saving his grandchild, Sandgorse died saving a rando in a tunnel, Tom the Wifebeater saving his daughter.

But Tom the Wifebeater is the worst example of it. Hands down.

[darkfire359]

What could have been: sympathizing with Ed in season 2

I've talked before about how much I love Ed and all his complexity. I've written more fanfic about him and Izzy than any other characters, in my entire history of fandom. And unlike many people, I wasn't unprepared for the dark direction his arc took in season 2; I wanted him to commit MORE atrocities, and I happily made comparisons between him and another one of my favorite characters, Hannibal Lector.

But one of the key things I wanted after he committed atrocities was for him to feel bad about it. And I thought we'd see that! After all, S1 Ed was so tormented about killing his dad (who was abusive and violent towards) him that he never killed (directly) again! He was so broken up about trying to kill Stede in s1e6 that he ended up crying in a bathtub. Just like he cried in the window sill after committing all the kraken horrors in s1e10. It seemed like this was a guy scared of his own inner darkness, convinced he was a monster, who would go around saying things like "I'm not a good person" and "You were always going to realize who I am."

And so even when s2 went darker than anyone expected—when he cut off more of Izzy's toes, and shot him in the leg, and made crewmen fight to the death for experiencing love, and sailed the entire ship into a storm to murder-suicide his crew—I was still ready to accept all that moral ambiguity and give him a hug afterwards. Because of course, I figured that after Ed was brought out of that dark place and those suicidal urges, he would feel horrible remorse. How could he not?

I was looking forward to seeing him break down crying, convinced he was an irredeemable, unforgivable monster. (Which of course, would make it all the more touching when people inevitably did forgive him, and when he did redeem himself). Maybe Ed would even go too far with trying to atone, like in Mercy, one of my favorite post-s1 fics. Probably, I figured, Ed's quest for redemption would be one of the main themes in the second half of season 2.

So it was strange to watch e4, when Ed looked nothing but annoyed at everyone for chaining him up and banishing him, and then he went to hang out with his old friends like he'd done nothing wrong. When after the crew unanimously voted him out, Stede brought him back to the ship literally that same evening, and Ed saw no problem with that. Okay... maybe he's still processing?

Then e5 came, and that episode was about Ed's redemption. Yay! Except... Ed didn't seem to care? Other people made him wear the bag and the bell. He asked how long it'd take people to get over it, guessing "like a day." He gave an influencer-esque non-apology to the crew. He said "I took a man's leg" rather than calling Izzy by name. He literally doesn't remember the circumstances of pushing Lucius off the boat. He does ultimately give a real apology to Fang—for tormenting him years ago, rather than anything from his actual kraken era. I love e5 for the Izzy+Stede dynamic, but watching Ed be an unrepentant asshole here is painful. There is nothing about this that convinces me Ed wouldn't slide right back to being evil if Stede were to leave again.

And the thing is, it didn't have to be like this! We could have gotten Ed breaking down crying with guilt like in s1e6, and it would have made him much more sympathetic—not to mention the fact that Ed really is just an adorable cryer. Alternatively, we could have had some real deep diving about why Ed never apologizes (is he afraid of seeming weak?) or why he's so uncaring about others' pain (has he seen too many friends die over the years, to the point of going numb?)

By episode 6, it seems like most characters have moved on. Stede says something about Ed turning poison into positivity, which feels completely unearned. He pays for the party—but he'd previously tried to make the crew throw their cut of the loot into the ocean. He makes some attempts to best Ned and protect Stede, but Stede ends up saving the crew instead—from a pirate who only showed up in the first place because Ed was intentionally trying to piss him off. Ed is sad that Stede kills someone, and this would be a great time to again make Ed sympathetic! To have him talk about how he doesn't want that for Stede, because his own violence has weighed on him so deeply. But nope.

E6 does see Ed actually apologize to Izzy—and he's terrible at it. He's just like, "Sorry about your leg," makes no eye contact, and flees immediately afterwards. We do see some hints that this shitty apology isn't really indicative of Ed's true feelings, given how he has those flashbacks to the scenes of hurting Izzy seemingly haunting him; but it's very brief. It would be a great time to address Ed's horrific tendency towards conflict-aversion and avoiding awkward conversations in relationships—the same tendency that made s1 Ed never inform Izzy that the plan to kill Stede and the Revenge crew had changed. This would be another great opportunity to help us sympathize with Ed again—to have us see how it's not that he doesn't want to communicate these things, it's that these conversations are terribly stressful and anxiety-inducing for him. But nah, why would OFMD need to include those things for Ed?

E7 happens, and still nothing. If anything, there was a great opportunity for Ed to at least show himself to be a kind person to Stede—maybe nobly stepping in to save the day, even though he's annoyed that Stede's getting all this attention now. You know, like Stede did for him back in s1e5, when the situation was reversed. But nope, Ed runs off to be a fisherman, not having learned any of the earlier season's lessons about whims. He only stops being a fisherman because he's bad at it.

I was still hoping for something big in e8–some huge selfless, gesture that Ed would do to cover for all of his inability to do the little gestures. Ed is good at grand gestures! Swimming back to the ship after he left, then taking the Act of Grace in s1 was HUGE. Very selfless, very sweet! He could have done something like that for Izzy, Lucius, and the traumatized crew. Some kind of heroic gesture to help others more than himself. But nope. In some sense, Izzy dying is one of the greatest indications of Ed's wasted potential, because we narratively had a great opportunity for Ed to be able to save someone... but he didn't.

(Admittedly, Ed is not a complete dick here—he helps Izzy when he's limping, he says some genuinely apologetic stuff when Izzy's dying, and he finally gives Izzy his attention and care. But then after the funeral, he's still like "Well, that's that.")

It's so frustrating. It's not that I don't want to like Ed, or that I don't want to sympathize with him. I really, REALLY do! I don't even need Ed to successfully do anything to earn forgiveness! I'd take Ed trying and failing. I'd take him wanting to try, but being so convinced of his monstrousness that he never makes the attempt. But give me something. Anything other than the unexamined apathy that he has so much of the time.

The thing is, s2 lost the ability for Ed's mistreatment of people to be just another "of course he's violent, he's a pirate" quirk. They were pretty explicit about how abusive Ed was (Jim's comment in e1, the joke in e4 people assumed Ed had hit Stede) and how much he traumatized people (Lucius and the whole crew very clearly have PTSD in episodes 4 and 5). This is serious stuff, which he did to other main characters, which is going to make a lot of viewers look at him pretty harshly.

And that's manageable—Hannibal Lector managed to be most textbook-abusive asshole in the world, committing atrocities and generally being unrepentant left and right, and viewers STILL found him lovable and sympathetic. You can do that! But you need to:

a. make it clear that anyone with the relevant information calls them out for being awful, even multiple episodes later

b. make it clear that they care deeply and genuinely about their wronged loved ones

c. make them willing to actually make REAL sacrifices

I watched so many people start to dislike or outright hate Ed in season 2. It made me really sad. But I couldn't blame them for feeling that way. For all that Ed is supposedly one of the two protagonists in OFMD—a character whose mistakes should be the most understandable, whose mental state should be the most resonant—the show seemed to entirely drop the ball on writing him as such.

[codenamesazanka]

what was the point of the possession plot. for real, someone tell me it’s most lasting impact, because as of now:

AFO becomes final boss maybe AFO will have another comeback but currently he’s being handled and defeated by someone who is not the main protag

Deku physically and metaphorically saves Shigaraki from AFO Shigaraki broke free on his own!

moral lesson about Shigaraki’s rage being detrimental by empowering Ultimate Evil AFO to continue controlling him Shigaraki’s negative emotions leads to AFO’s downfall because it was too powerful for AFO to control

[sysig]

Old habits die hard all the way around (Patreon)

[imminent-danger-came]

continue being a little mean to toh fans please it is really irritating how some act like its got the best writing of any modern cartoon

Daawwwww I don't have it in me. TOH fans love it for a reason, and there are legitimately good moments! It's just not the most complex or well-written show out there—which it doesn't need to be—but I also totally get your exhaustion. It gets tiring seeing people praise it so highly over and over again when it's just like...fine. It didn't do nothing but it also didn't do something, you know? It's main couple is cute and queer, but that's pretty much all there is to them. It has a fun cast of characters, but they all tend to fall into archetypes. Luz is a sweet main character, but she doesn't have any real flaws and kinda takes a back seat to Hunter and Eda (the white people lol). Her foil with Philip was interesting...but then they kinda backed off and went the "you and Belos are nothing alike" direction.

((I'm also going to answer this anon with another: ))

And It's not that an unsympathetic villian is bad, or that Belos would even be sympathetic with added backstory, it's just that...there were a lot of interesting things to explore with his character that were left hanging.

Like, while he's definitely not at all a good person, it's intriguing that he would bother to recreate his brother over and over again knowing that each time the grimwalker was going to betray him. It's intriguing that he was even willing to kill his brother to begin with (though Caleb was super underutilized in general). Like, you can give a villain depth without justifying or victimizing them (hi Finnegran from tdp, I'll also add Spider Queen & LBD here). So it just feels like a missed opportunity all across the board. It's still surprising to me that we got a confirmation on the Wittebane backstory through an unrelated background character, rather than Philip himself (who had literally possessed a main character, and mindscapes had already been well-established....the pieces were all there me thinks).

And obviously it's like, people can love something despite it's flaws, and they can cherish it for the good it has, but they still don't need to praise it as an ultimate form of media, you know? We don't need to pretend toh was this dark and complex story—it was just a story a lot of people liked and resonated with. Which I'm glad it's there for those people, and I'm glad there are options when it comes to queer pieces of media!

That said the show with the best writing of any modern cartoon is The Dragon Prince (streaming on Netflix).

[crossdressingdeath]

Can I just... okay, there's something that's been percolating in my head ever since the Durgetash patch 6 crumbs dropped and I think I can finally put it into words. Because everyone was getting so mad about Durge (and it was about Durge, not Gortash; it was an origin character getting their backstory acknowledged in the game at a point where it should've been from the start, saying it was about Gortash is like saying... I don't know, any unique dialogue Cazador gets in Astarion origin runs is Cazador content) getting five or six new lines when Wyll got nothing and... well, personally I think that's a little silly, first because adding a few new Gortash lines to Durge runs would not be taking away from Wyll content (the two characters have different writers, VAs and mocap actors, for the most part they would not have been pulling from the same resource pool), but more importantly because... if you want to point at an origin character taking resources from Wyll, don't point at Durge. Point at Karlach.

I mean, think about it. Think about how the game runs with these two characters. You likely meet Wyll first unless you go out of your way to avoid speaking to him until you meet Karlach. He asks you to help him hunt down and kill a devil, and you go and you look and you find her and... now you're doing Karlach's quest. They interrupt Wyll's quest in the middle to do Karlach's quest. And she keeps piping up during the conversation with Mizora afterwards, and it turns out that Wyll got sent after Karlach to begin with because Karlach is Zariel's extra-special favourite mortal, and suddenly Wyll's sharing his post-quest transformation cutscene (something which I think we can all agree should be entirely about him) with a character who wasn't even playable until a ways into EA. You can't even properly commiserate with Wyll afterwards, you can only even be nice to him if you choose to read the lines that way; you spend more time chatting to Karlach about Wyll's transformation than you do Wyll! Wyll's act one quest gets almost completely taken over by Karlach, I'm honestly kind of surprised I haven't seen anyone else talking about it. Even him being turned into a devil is barely about him because Karlach's backstory is butting in! There is a reason why no other origins share villains, but where Karlach's connection to Gortash is overshadowed by Durge in a Durge run here she's overshadowing Wyll in every run except maybe (I say maybe because I haven't done it) a Wyll origin.

And it gets even better! Remember how originally you couldn't save Karlach at all? Remember when it was death or mind flayer? Remember what Larian did when people complained about that? I'm fucking amazed I didn't see more complaints about that, given the number of complaints I saw about Durgetash getting five whole lines. Do you want to keep Karlach alive? Do you want to end the game with all your companions still breathing and reasonably happy? Well then fuck what you think is a good, happy and/or narratively satisfying ending for Wyll; you're packing him off to the Hells, because that's the only way to keep Karlach alive if you don't want to go with her (which you probably don't if you romanced someone other than her)! Like, I want you to really let that sink in; they made Karlach's survival completely reliant on how you end Wyll's quest. If you want Karlach to survive and don't want your character's epilogue to be "go to the Hells" (which, again, odds are most players don't) you have to end Wyll's quest accordingly. They could've put that into Karlach's quest! Give her an actual character arc (instead of the line-with-maybe-a-slight-curve she got) where you can encourage her to choose life and go to Avernus on her own or... I don't know, go with Dammon or something! Especially since as it turns out Zariel apparently doesn't actually give a shit, which the PC should be able to point out given Zariel's track record in this game of giving barely enough of a shit to make a token effort at getting Karlach back or killing her! But instead the climax of Wyll's whole damn arc has to share space with Karlach. Maybe not in the game's text proper, but from a meta perspective? If the player doesn't want to go to the Hells but wants Karlach to live, that's likely going to be if not the deciding factor in Wyll's quest then certainly a major one in—as with the transformation cutscene—a situation that should be entirely about Wyll.

I don't really know how to end this. I guess... I fully admit part of it is me being super petty about the sheer number of posts I saw getting mad about Durgetash getting literally five or six lines (crumbs! Barely crumbs! Crumbs that didn't impact Wyll in any way!), but it also really is like... people complained about that but I haven't seen anyone complaining about how Larian warped Wyll's whole story around Karlach. And I think more people should complain about it. Wyll's story got dragged off-course the second they started rewriting it, but they wrapped the whole thing around Karlach when they made her an origin companion to the point where at times it feels like Wyll's playing second fiddle in his own arc, and that's... well, honestly it just pisses me off.

[loveoaths]

darth maul is just yzma for boys. savage is kronk.

[rillette]

Star sapphire redesign for warmup today 👍